Les petits differences OR The Little Differences

Little differences / quirky things I’ve noticed:



*Toilet paper comes in black, red, and pink (Nicole: guess what you are getting for xmas??)



*I am an amazon here, towering over nearly all the other women and a fair amount of the men. Big crowd at the market? No problem. But when talking to other people or waiting in line, I find myself slouching down to be at their level, mostly so I can hear better! Occasionally it makes me feel oversized and awkward, like the clumsy adolescent who keeps making mistakes. In this case, the mistake is that I didn’t stop growing when I reached a respectable height. And, sadly, if I ever need to buy shoes here, it might be difficult to find my size! Keep in mind that I am only five foot six—I wouldn’t exactly consider myself “tall” in the States! And you know that scene in Lost in Translation, where Bill Murray is trying to take a shower, but the showerhead is at, like, chest level? Yeah.



*I had forgotten or maybe never fully experienced the “French stinkiness” when I was studying abroad in Annecy. Well, I’ve experienced it now! I think most men do not wear deodorant, so there is often a very ripe, er, manly scent—a sort of stinky aura, really, that surrounds them. Since it is customary to kiss on the cheeks when meeting friends here, and since personal space is, in general, less than in the States, I have had a few really trying moments, especially when taking public transport, where I’ve been squished up against some very friendly and helpful, but Stinky French man. I haven’t really noticed this with women yet, but if I ever find somewhere to do yoga….well, let’s not imagine that just yet!



*The walls in our apartment are very very thin, so thin that Kathrin, the German assistant, can probably hear me setting down my glasses on the nightstand at night. There is a family who lives above us, and it is sometimes hard to tell if someone has just entered and is walking around Our apartment, or theirs. Also, since there are no rugs or carpeting anywhere to absorb sounds, and the ceilings are quite high, there are a lot of echoes and everything sounds even bigger, louder and closer. For instance, I am sitting in my room reading, when suddenly I hear a great CRASH! I rush into the kitchen, thinking someone has fallen down the stairs outside the apartment, but it is only that a spatula has fallen onto the floor from the drain rack. Happily, a teacher has just given me an old rug for my room, and it feels much less like a cave!



*My high school students are old enough to buy alcohol and, I guess, cigarettes. I keep seeing little clusters of kids sitting in a circle, smoking, just outside of the school grounds. This has been pretty weird and a little disturbing so far…some of them look like they are twelve, with braces and pimples and everything, it just seems wrong! Even the kids who aren’t 18, but look like they could be, can purchase alcohol, since no one checks ids. I tried to explain how different it is in the States to a group of kids, but I’m not sure if they really understood.



*One of the English teachers told me that many of his students are completely unused to any kind of creative writing or self expression at school. He had assigned them to write poems about themselves, following a rubrick like, “I dream of……” “I cry when…..” and finding adjectives and short phrases that identified them. This was apparently totally novel, and some of them had a really hard time being creative, and not censoring themselves. I thought this was really strange, since, when you walk around the school grounds, they are all dressed so expressively, so individually, with a huge range of personal styles, much more so than at an average American high school. There are posters and flyers for different musical groups, and I’m sure the kids are bubbly and expressive outside of the classroom. The teacher told me that this is one of France’s great paradoxes—it’s a cultural mecca in many ways, but the school system is still backward and kind of oppressive, kind of smushing students down into “ideal pupils” for the bacc exam. Even getting them to talk in class is sometimes hard, they are so used to lecture-style learning.







Today was the orientation day in Besancon, which mostly consisted of a LOT of paperwork! I did get to meet some more English speakers (and non-english speaking assistants) and it felt really good to talk to people who are having the same problems and to compare travel horror stories. (One girls baggage was lost when she flew into Paris, so she didnt have her clothes or toiletries for TEN DAYS when she first arrived! She wears a size ten shoe, so finding replacements was nearly impossible, she had to borrow shoes from a man she met! The airline company finally returned her luggage and it was broken and ripped up...). In general, apart from the internet problems, I feel very very lucky! Miss you all, though!